I am very saddened by recent events, just know if anything ever happens, I will protect your children at all cost. I understand that there are many questions and concerns, the district should put out an email shortly about how to explain the recent events to your children.

I look forward to seeing everyone on Thursday over Zoom for parent-teacher conferences. I will send it the Zoom link over Remind later in the week, and you can find it on the Sign-Up Genius Link.  A Friendly reminder that on Thursday the dismissal time is 11:30.

Phonics

This week we heavily focused on phonics, specifically word families and letter sounds. A word family consists of words that share an ending part of a word (rime), e.g., am, ham & Sam. In addition to recognizing rhymes, knowledge of short vowel sounds is crucial when learning to read and spell. Interestingly, short vowel sounds can be the hardest for beginner readers to match to letters.  

This week’s and next week’s snap words focus on these word families. For example, this week, we worked on the words (and the correlating word families), am, an, at. We also worked on reading and writing “can” because it is part of the “-an” word family. 

Reading

We focused our reading instruction on punctuation, precisely the period, exclamation point, and question mark. We learned that these marks change how we read and understand sentences.

We also started to read the Gingerbread man books and even ate a gingerbread cookie. We will continue to read different Gingerbread man versions all month long. Using these books, we will learn about setting, problem, characters, and solution and connect and compare different versions of this classic tale.  

Social Studies

We learned that some people celebrate Hanukkah, and we played the dreidel game. Finally, we compared and contrasted the different traditions of Hanukkah and Christmas. When your child is the star of the day, they will bring in a poster that explains what they celebrate, and we will hang these posters in the hallway. 

Math:

This week during math, we focused on shapes. We worked on identifying and sorting shapes based on size, length, height, weight, and color. We used mystery boxes to figure out what shapes were placed in the box by only using our sense of touch. We also created a classroom graph of our favorite colors! This week, we also got to meet the calculator; we explored calculators at centers.

Writing:

This week, we wrote a story about our thanksgiving, and we wrote a list of writing topics that we wanted to write about. We also reviewed when to use a capital letter in our writing. Next week, we will be working on how to write stories for our readers.